Posted
by
msmash
on Friday August 12, 2016 @03:24PM
from the save-animals dept.

Kerry Flynn, writing for Mashable: Looking to buy an elephant tusk on eBay? Might not be so easy. The e-commerce giant, along with Etsy, Gumtree, Microsoft, Pinterest, Tencent and Yahoo, have signed on to a new commitment to prevent the sale of illegal wildlife products on their services. The initiative is in collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund, the International Fund for Animal Welfare and TRAFFIC, and was announced Friday to coincide with World Elephant Day. Under the new policy, companies are seeking to prohibit the sale of wild live animals and animal body parts that are sourced illegally, species that are threatened by extinction and other protected animals. That includes rhino horns, pangolin parts and turtle meat. It's the first time that conservation organizations have partnered with multiple tech companies. Prior, the WWF, for example, has worked with other organizations individually.Recently, the Indian government had accused several tech companies including Amazon of "selling" rare animals and their parts.

My boys recently got into Pokemon (the TV series for my oldest, the TV show and cards for my youngest). I brought up that Pokemon is basically capturing wild animals and training them to fight each other. Looked at this way, what Ash and his friends do is terrible, not fantastic. Especially when it seems that these wild animals have some kind of sentience. (I've experienced some of the TV shows by virtue of being in the next room while my boys watch it.)

On the other hand, the stuff is already supposed to be illegal. So what are they doing exactly? Pledging to obey the law? A lot of this stuff doesn't have regional exceptions like gambling, alcohol, or porn.

Never nice to see another conspiratorial daydream posted on slashdot, but it's not unexpected these days. There's nothing new about these laws, in fact most of the planet have been bound to them for decades by international treaties, refusing to cooperate with NGOs working on international anti-trafficking efforts would attract unwanted scrutiny from dozens of different governments.

The cause may be good, but the ends don't justify the means. Censorship is not the answer to these sorts of problems. It can't be the answer to any sort of problem as the approach disrupts the concept of democracy. We don't have truly democratic systems now because we're excluding a significant portion of the people in our society. From immigrants and criminals to children. We need to get away from censorship and open our voting booths to everybody whose here.